The present invention generally relates to consumer electronics devices and more specifically to consumer electronics devices configured to playback content accessed via the Internet.
An increasing variety of consumer electronics devices, including but not limited to televisions, DVD/Blu-ray players, set-top boxes, mobile phones and game consoles, possess the capability of connecting to the Internet. An enormous variety of content exists on the Internet, which is accessible from numerous sources. Each source typically publishes content in its own unique way. Personal computers can access content via the Internet using a web browser application and a variety of plug-ins that enable viewing of the content, which can include but is not limited to audio, video, text, and/or still images. Discovery of content is often facilitated by the recommendations of a specific site, recommendations of other users, and/or a search engine. Navigation using a web browser and search engines is reliant upon use of a keyboard and a pointing device such as a mouse or touchpad. Consumer electronics devices typically provide a remote control or game controller as a user input device. Such input devices are unsuited to navigation using a web browser and/or searching via a search engine. Therefore, manufacturers of consumer electronics devices typically develop user interfaces specific to a particular device that enable the devices to access content via the Internet from a limited number of sources. Considerable effort is required to integrate each site from which content is accessible via the user interface and that effort is replicated by each manufacturer and for each class of device.